Thomas William Parsons was born at Boston in 1818. He spent the greater part of his life in Europe. In 1867 he translated Dante’s “Inferno.” In 1854 he published, under the title “Ghetto di Roma,” a collection of his poems. He died at Scituate, Mass., in 1892.
See, from his counterfeit of him
Whom Arno shall remember long,
How stern of lineament, how grim,
The father was of Tuscan song!
There but the burning sense of wrong,
Perpetual care and scorn abide;
Small friendship for the lordly throng;
Distrust of all the world beside.
Faithful if this wan image be,
No dream his life was, but a fight;
Could any Beatrice see
A lover in that anchorite?
To that cold Ghibeline’s gloomy sight
Who could have guessed the visions came
Of beauty, veiled with heavenly light,
In circles of eternal flame?
The lips as Cumæ’s cavern close,
The cheeks with fast and sorrow thin,
The rigid front, almost morose,
But for the patient hope within,
Declare a life whose course hath been
Unsullied still, though still severe;
Which, through the wavering days of sin,
Kept itself icy-chaste and clear.
Peace dwells not here—this rugged face
Betrays no spirit of repose;
The sullen warrior sole we trace,
The marble man of many woes.
Such was his mien when first arose
The thought of that strange tale divine,
When hell he peopled with his foes,
The scourge of many a guilty line.
BALLAD OF OLD TIME LADIES.
BY FRANÇOIS VILLON.
This ballad, of which we give Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation, was written by Villon in 1450. There are many translations of the poems of that beggar, poet, thief—that first lucid poet of France. Andrew Lang has interpreted him in one way, John Payne in another. The following translation is, perhaps, the happiest of this particular poem, though the ballad cannot but lose some of its spirit in an English rendering.
Tell me, now, in what hidden way is
Lady Flora the lovely Roman?
Where’s Hipparchia, and where is Thais—
Neither of them the fairer woman?
Where is Echo, beheld of no man,
Only heard on river and mere—
She whose beauty was more than human?
But where are the snows of yesteryear?
Where’s Heloise, the learned nun,
For whose sake Abeillard, I ween,
Lost manhood and put priesthood on?
(From love he won such dule and teen!)
And where, I pray you, is the Queen
Who willed that Buridan should steer,
Sewed in a sack’s mouth, down the Seine?
But where are the snows of yesteryear?
White Queen Blanche, like a queen of lilies
With a voice like any mermaiden—
Bertha Broadfoot, Beatrice, Alice,
And Ermengarde, the lady of the Maine—
And that good Joan, whom Englishmen
At Rouen doomed, and burned her there—
Mother of God, where are they, then?
But where are the snows of yesteryear?